


I'm Alone, Yeah

by nubianamy



Series: What  You Do To Me, No One Knows [2]
Category: Glee
Genre: Busking, Loneliness, M/M, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 08:07:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/809280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nubianamy/pseuds/nubianamy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>LA sucks, but Puck needs an incentive to call Finn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm Alone, Yeah

_I'm alone, yeah, I don't know if I can face the night_  
 _I'm in tears and the cryin' that I do is for you_  
 _I want your love_  
 _Let's break the walls between us_  
 _Don't make it tough_  
 _I'll put away my pride_  
 _Enough's enough  
_ _I've suffered and I've seen the light_

_-[Aerosmith, "Angel"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKXJt-XUuMo&list=PLE618DC69C20D47BB&index=3)_

* * *

Puck watched the neon sign outside the window of his shithole apartment change from pink, to bright yellow, to blue-white and back about six thousand times without calling Finn. It wasn't that he didn't want to. It was that he didn't know what he would have told him.  _The city sucks as much as it did yesterday,_  he might have said, _and the stupid fucking lights are keeping me awake again. How's the army?_  Only he didn't really want to hear the answer to that, so he didn't call, even though Burt had given him the number over a month ago.

Nothing got easier until he started playing his guitar for tips near the Hollywood and Vine Metro station. He didn't make a lot of money, but he got some smiles, a lot more than he got scowls, and that was good enough. But it got him playing again, which he hadn't done hardly at all since he'd left Lima at the beginning of the summer. It felt good, familiar, and maybe it hurt a little less to be a loser in LA when people threw dollars or fives into his case as they walked by.

He didn't know what it was that made him play that stupid Aerosmith song in the first place. It was something Finn had listened to, and Puck had teased him mercilessly for it, but of course he knew all the lyrics, and the changes were easy, and he might have worked up the guitar solo at one point.

The guy who stopped to listen didn't look anything like Finn. He was short and wiry and his skin was coffee-colored, like he probably had some Hispanic in him somewhere. But he had a set of lungs, and he set right in to singing the harmonies with Puck, startling him into missing a cue. They sang the whole fucking song like that, Puck doing melody and the guy soaring above, and by the end Puck was about three seconds away from bursting into tears.

"That was awesome," the guy said reverently.

"Yeah," Puck admitted, looking away. "I feel like I should be tipping  _you."_

He touched Puck's guitar case with a little half-smile. "You've sung that one before, with some other guy."

"I - yeah. Used to." No sense in denying it. They'd been singing it since before Finn's voice had changed.

"You should call him," he said. "Don't let it go."

"He doesn't care." Puck stood his guitar on his lap, cradling the body in his arms. "Not - not like that."  _Not like I do._

"Don't matter," he said earnestly. "You want it, what've you got to lose? Take the weight off your heart, man."

Puck went home that night and lay on his mattress and stared at the neon sign, pink-yellow-blue, pink-yellow-blue, drumming a slow beat on his knee, until he found enough courage - or maybe desperation, he wasn't sure - to pick up his phone and dial the number Burt had given him. He rested his phone on his chest, listening to it ring on speaker. It wouldn't matter what Finn said in response. It was enough, just to know he'd hear, finally, what Puck had been thinking for the better part of six years.


End file.
